


Ghoul

by pontmercyfriend



Series: Danger Days [7]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:34:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22778773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontmercyfriend/pseuds/pontmercyfriend
Summary: The making of Fun Ghoul.
Series: Danger Days [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636693
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	Ghoul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacestationtrustfund](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/gifts).



_When your car runs out of fuel and your pocket runs out of carbons to buy more liquid to burn—when you’ve run out of juice, when you’re sweating and struggling, skin peeling apart underneath the unforgiving glare of the sun—when you’ve got nothing left except yourself, you bury your shell where you have to stop and you start walking. When your car breaks down you start walking. When your boots wear thin you start crawling. When your hands are scraped raw and bleeding you close your eyes and you pray to the Witch: get me out get me out get me out of here alive._

He doesn’t like to think of his life as a tragic backstory.

It’s nothing more than just another story.

He was born in the desert, he knows that for certain, knows it like he knows that the sun doesn’t love him and his blood is the same reddish-brown color as the rust corroding everything. He thinks probably his parents are dead. It’s probably better that they’re dead.

It doesn’t mean much anyway, whether they’re living or otherwise; most sand pup kids make their way over to the Nest sooner or later, family or no, where Birdie and a handful of other zonerunners will do their best to raise them.

Birdie is the first person in his memories—explosive, atomic, larger than life, looming over him. Her hair was the brightest thing he’d ever seen, more golden than the sun. She had a bottle of water and a blaster strapped to her hip. “Hey, kiddo,” she said, looking down at him where he sat sprawled in the sand, sunburned and hungry with a bad case of the dust mouth. “C’mon with me.”

He’s known Birdie his whole life. She gave him his name, handpicked from the advertisements section of a pre-war newspaper—Fun Ghoul. He couldn’t read the letters, but he knew enough to recognize the curves and spikes of the ones that made up his name. The newspaper is long gone, repurposed into some papier-mâché creation or stuffed into overlarge boots or shoved into gaping cracks in the thin walls of the Nest in the hopes that the acid rain and the radiation wouldn’t soak through everything.

Birdie is special. She’s one of the few people he thinks he can still say he truly trusts.

Growing up doesn’t move in a linear fashion; one day he’s six, the next he’s nine. He never remembers his own birthday—Birdie says it’s the day he stumbled into her life, covered in dust and burns and bitterness. She keeps track of the days by listening to the radio. Doctor Death-Defying announces the date whenever he can, and Birdie listens to his frequency almost religiously. Ghoul can’t remember a time when he didn’t keep a radio on hand whenever possible, tuned into W-KIL 109, the station that shouldn’t be able to exist. Always on, always hopeful.

Kids in the Zones have to find their own paths for themselves, in the end. The desert isn’t a caring environment. The desert doesn’t forgive. He knows this. There has never been a time that he didn’t know this.

He meets Show Pony when he’s—he doesn’t remember how old he is. He thinks maybe he’s almost thirteen. (“Almost a teenager,” Birdie says, “gonna be causing me even more trouble than already, huh?”) Days are endless loops of _sun_ - _sky_ - _sand_ and the heat on the back of his neck and the grit between his teeth.

Show Pony glides into the Nest and throws themself down on the orange-checkered couch, upending a bag of clumsily wrapped packages onto the cushion next to them. “Hey, hey, feathers, grab me a drink, wontcha? All this rolling has got my goddamn bearings shot.”

“You’re one spoiled runner,” Birdie humphs as she gathers up the packages, but she sounds fond, and she hands over a bottle of room-temperature water. “Got any other grievances, since you seem to think of this as your own personal confessional, kiddo?”

“Well, since ya asked. Gonna need new cushions soon too—they’re dry an’ cracked, sugar-sweet, fuckin’ figures that the blades would get dust mouth just like me.”

“Can’t help you there, princess,” Birdie says. She sets her hands on her hips and frowns. “Ghoul, come out from behind the couch. You can say hello to Show Pony.”

Ghoul slinks reluctantly out into the open, sulking. He doesn’t want to say hello to anybody. The skates catch his attention; they fascinate him. Birdie’s taught all the kids how to take apart a reassemble basic machines in the same way that she taught them all to shoot straight, but Show Pony’s skates are unlike anything Ghoul has ever seen before.

He wants them.

“Hey, kid,” Show Pony says, and Ghoul bristles. He isn’t a kid. Show Pony doesn’t look that much older than him, either. “You got a name?”

“Ghoul.”

“Milkshakes. I’m Show Pony,” says Show Pony, even though Ghoul already knows; everybody knows about Show Pony. “You’re a sand pup, right, kid?”

“’M not a fucking kid,” Ghoul mumbles. “’M twelve.” Probably.

Show Pony’s eyes sparkle. “My bad, sugar. Didn’t mean to offend.” They gesture towards their feet, propped up on the ratty old cushions. “You like ’em?”

Ghoul shrugs. He tries to look nonchalant when he says, “They’re okay.”

“Pretty shiny, huh?”

Show Pony’s wiggling one ankle meaningfully in his direction; Ghoul twitches noncommittally. “I guess.”

“Wanna try ’em out?”

Instead, he got a friend. Show Pony—and, later, Doctor Death-Defying—are the only other people he knows he can say he trusts.

He was still a wide-eyed and wide-eared kid back then, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be quick to say that nobody living raised him. The desert raised him. The ghosts raised him. The Witch raised him. He’s had dreams where he’s walking beside her while she pushes her old shopping cart through the desert, looking for lost souls. It’s the most fucked-up mail collection there is.

Ghoul was fifteen when he ran into a patrol of Exterminators out in Zone One, closer to the city than he had ever gone before. He thought he was going to die. It was the same sort of thought he might have when he ran out of juice out on Resurrection Road while driving in a stolen car, and realized, _yeah, I’m fucked_.

He fought as hard as he could.

It didn’t change anything.

They jabbed a syringe into his neck and drugged him into a stupor, bundled him up, and took him into the city.

For kids growing up in the Zones, Battery City was a prison. It was hell. Ghoul and some of the other sand pups at the Nest used to play games—similar to games like tag or sharks and minnows—where they would pretend that half the kids were dracs and half were joys, and if you were tagged, you were in jail. If you were tagged again, you got yourself ghosted.

Ghoul didn’t think he would ever end up within the city walls—at least not while he was still breathing. He kind of figured he would be brought in inside a body bag, at the end of it all, if he wasn’t left to rot in the desert.

The exxies who had captured him took him to a white-walled room with nothing in it. There wasn’t a bed. There wasn’t any water. The light was a bluish gray color. Ghoul sat down with his back against the wall opposite the door, stretched his legs out, and contemplated the situation.

He stopped contemplating when a woman dressed in black and white opened the door, walked into the room, and got a syringe in his arm before he could think to struggle.

He didn’t remember very much after that.

The next thing he remembered clearly was being half-carried along a hallway. His legs were too weak to support him fully.

The person carrying him had bright-colored hair, like someone from the Zones, and was shooting over their shoulder with a blaster. Ghoul tried to struggle free—something about the situation felt horribly out of place—but he couldn’t get his body to move. He didn’t know how much time had passed.

He learned later that he had spent almost three months being drugged and brainwashed and dragged through rehabilitative therapy sessions. Three months of his life sent spiraling down the drain.

Wasted.

His mind was wiped after each supposed therapy session. The doctor had reassured him each time him that he would have a fresh start.

He only stopped fighting the restraints when they covered his mouth with a cloth soaked in chloroform.

The smell made his head hurt and his stomach turn upside down; when he woke up after the first time they used the chloroform, he threw up until there wasn’t anything left inside his stomach to expel. He would have choked on his own vomit if one of the doctors hadn’t cleaned him off.

He was rescued by a group of juvie halls, he learned later. At the time he didn’t know that juvie halls had any affiliation with zonerunners, beyond the occasional correspondence regarding transportation of goods that the joys might want to raid. The two groups lived in vastly separate worlds, and Ghoul had always been perfectly fine with it remaining that way. He thought juvie halls were cowards, for having the opportunity to escape the city and not taking it.

The juvie hall group rescuing him was led by someone called Baby, who had bright pink hair and wore a cloth covering the lower half of their face during the entire operation. None of them spoke, just gestured soundlessly and communicated with their eyes.

Ghoul was too drugged out to comprehend fully what was going on, but he saw the swarms of dracs running after them with blasters drawn, and the juvie halls shooting back at their pursuers as they hurried towards the exit.

There were bodies on the floor—dracs and juvie halls alike, faint wisps of smoke rising from their skin where lasers had connected. There was inexplicable blood smeared on Baby’s face that trickled onto Ghoul’s neck and into the collar of the nondescript white shirt he had been forced to wear.

A system had been set in place, he learned, sometime during or after the whole mess.

The system was designed specifically for rescuing captured zonerunners who had been taken into the city and forced through the rehab-slash-torture programs, which were little more than thinly veiled excuses to experiment on living test subjects. New doses of medications. New combinations of drugs. Life as a test subject. Life as a symptom. Focusing only on the immediate effect.

The aftermath is secondary.

He fucking hated those words.

The juvie halls managed to smuggle Ghoul and a few other captives out of the city by literally wrapping them up in blankets and stuffing them into the trunks of various cars that were due to leave the city. Routine scouting trips, trash disposal trucks, that sort of thing. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was what they had, and that was what mattered.

“Thirty minutes, and we’ll getcha outta here, chip, just gotta kick the vamps offa our trails,” Baby hissed, and the trunk slammed shut with finality.

Ghoul heard the sound of footsteps, the muted mumble of people conversing, and then the low grumble of an engine starting. The car shuddered to life, and Ghoul squeezed his eyes shut. He was shivering; his clothes were too thin and the blanket was rough and scratchy against his oversensitive skin.

It wasn’t thirty minutes.

It was more like five hours.

He didn’t know when the car stopped moving; he couldn’t move, could barely breathe, for fear of being discovered. His left arm had fallen asleep and his legs were cramped from the position he was in, crammed into the small space.

He tried to focus on breathing. He could remember more of what had happened to him, and he was completely certain that he didn’t want to be found by the wrong person. It was this thought that kept him quiet and motionless when he wanted to flail and scream and sob. He couldn’t go back; he would rather die.

There was no way to cry for help, to ask for water. He needed to piss and his throat was raw and dry. There were no eyeholes. There was nothing but stale air and a cramped space and a million different potential scenarios in his head, each one worse than the last.

He didn’t know if the plan had been changed at all. If someone had fucked up. If his rescuers had forgotten that he was still trapped in the trunk of the car, curled up small and scared and helpless. He was used to the wide-open skies of the desert; he didn’t know how to keep himself breathing where he was.

He doesn’t like to talk about his time in the city, nor what came directly after.

Show Pony found him eventually, still huddled up in the trunk of the car, eyes shut tight, praying to the Witch that he would be saved in whatever way she deemed appropriate.

He didn’t have any personal belongings on him, not even his old blaster or his mask to identify his body. He thought, the Witch won’t be able to send me on. I’ll be cursed to wander forever, lonely and trapped.

He thought, but at least I’ll be in the desert where I fucking belong.

It was the only thing that kept him from breaking down completely.

Show Pony managed to get him onto his feet before Ghoul passed out again. Show Pony looked the same as they did when Ghoul first met them, years ago. Ghoul hadn’t paid attention before but now, delirious and confused, he felt like he was twelve years old again, hiding behind a moldering old orange couch and watching a sparkly figure on skates deliver the mail.

Pony half-dragged him all the way to the motel and nursed him back to relative health, staying with him when Ghoul convulsed and coughed up blood and bile during his withdrawal from the drugs, screaming about unnamed terrors hunting him in his sleep. There were rings underneath his eyes, dark like the bruises on his throat and chest, that didn’t go away. It was the worst at night, when he couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, couldn’t escape.

The next few months were a living hell. His skin didn’t fit him properly, even now that he was back home, and it must have shown, because he could see the distrust and caution in the eyes of everyone he encountered in the places that had once been comfortable.

Ghoul doesn’t even like to think about what happened.

He knows better than to trust too easily. He’s good at making IEDs, good at setting fires, and good at stitching himself back together. He’s learned to turn off the part of his brain that would get bothered by inflicting pain on others.

He’s a lousy shot; he’s not a fan of guns of any sort, even his own blaster. He makes up for it in other ways—he doesn’t need anyone watching his back.

He can take care of himself. He’s been doing it for his entire life. He’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t stop moving.


End file.
